As we mark our congregation’s 81st year and the beginning of our 82nd, I wonder what we owe the past? With a present full of excitement and action, and a future open to whatever our vision calls us to be, is the past simply over, or do our founders and members from decades ago still have a claim on us? Perhaps the answer appears when we consider how we hope the future church will speak of us when we are “past” ourselves?
This congregation held its first worship service on October 3, 1943, eighty-one years ago.
We first gathered in a rented store front at 12236 Ventura Boulevard. Today that address is occupied by a jewelry store, next to Art’s Deli and Licorice Pizza, on the south side of Ventura Boulevard near the intersection with Laurelgrove.
Rev. Herb Schneider was our founding minister. He served until 1964, twenty-one years.
That church is our church. We are connected to that first Sunday, through new members joining old members who become old members in their turn; through congregational meetings, work parties, and church dinners.
But what of that original church really matters to our church today?
Take the name of the church, for instance. The first name of this church was Christ Memorial Unity Church.
We put “Christ” as the first word of our name. Today, we’re not even sure whether the word “church” is appropriate for a congregation that includes folks from multiple religious and non-religious backgrounds.
We took “Christ” out of our name when we became the Unitarian Church of Studio City, in 1960. But the American Unitarian Association merged with the Universalist Church of America in 1961, and we changed our name again, officially adding the word Universalist to our name in 1974.
But in 1943, we were neither a Unitarian church, nor a Unitarian Universalist church. We were the Christ Memorial Unity Church.
The Unity church is one of the “New Thought” denominations that emerged in the late nineteenth century along with Science of Mind, Church of Religious Science, and Christian Science churches, all of whom can trace their origins back to the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Of course, Ralph Waldo Emerson was a Unitarian minister, for a few years, so Unitarians also claim his ancestry. But where the Unitarians followed a path that lead away from Christianity and toward a rational, humanist faith, the New Thought churches, including Unity, retained a form of Christian theology and Christian language, and embraced a more supernatural spirituality.
We were founded as a Unity Church, because Unity was the tradition that Herb Schneider had been formed in. But in 1953, ten years after our founding, Rev. Schneider resigned from the Unity ministry, and our congregation left the Unity denomination. For the next seven years we were the non-denominational Christ Memorial Church: still Christ but no longer Unity. And then we joined the American Unitarian Association in 1960, one year before they merged with the Universalist Church of America.
So we’re not the Christian church we were. We’re not the Unity church we were. We no longer meet on Ventura Boulevard, as we first did, having built this building in 1945. Herb Schneider is long gone, as is every other person who attended that first worship service.
So what’s left of that church? Where is it? The Christ Memorial Unity Church.
Herb Schneider’s name is posted over the door of our Fellowship Hall, which was built as the Youth Chapel in 1959. A cross remains worked into the wood work of our choir loft. But except for those hints of what we used to be, are we, in any real sense, the church that was founded on October 3, 1943?
Are we still living out their vision? Or have we replaced their vision with our own? What do we owe the church we were? And what does our church of the future owe us?
We’re looking in worship this year at a series of foundational spiritual issues. I’m offering a set of basic building blocks to use to construct a healthy theology. For myself this year, I’ve taken the challenge of wrestling with these perennial questions for maybe the last time as a professional minister, as I plan to retire next June.
And for you, although there’s no need for you to come to final answers, your worship goal this year might be to challenge yourself to settle your own personal beliefs. I hope you’ll feel comfortable disagreeing with me, if you do. Spiritual beliefs aren’t right or wrong, so I won’t judge. The test is not, “are your beliefs correct?” but, are your beliefs useful in creating a life of meaning, purpose, giving comfort to you and your loved ones in hard times, direction in confusing times, strength when needed, courage when tested, and joy at all times?
One of those foundational spiritual issues, the one I want to talk about today, is the relationship between the past, the present, and the future.
Many religious folks believe that God is eternal. God’s eternal nature means more than that God exists forever. Eternal means that God exists outside of time. Past, present, and future are all one to the eternal God. The human conception of time running linearly from the past, through the present, to the future, differs from God’s perception in which all time: past, present, and future, exists simultaneously.
This means, from the eternal God’s point of view that the future is just as set as is the past for us. God knows the winner of this year’s World Series. God knows the winner of next month’s Presidential election. It’s not that God knows who will win. The eternal God knows the winner who has already won.
From that thinking, arises the Calvinist doctrine of pre-destination, that from the beginning of time, God already knew exactly how every person would live their lives and whether that person’s ultimate destination would be Heaven or Hell. The script is finished; we’re just acting it out.
Many people, not just Calvinist theologians, believe that the future is knowable in this way, because the script is already written. I’ve been hearing advertisements on the radio lately about a service called California Psychics. The advertisements offer callers the benefit of “certainty.” The future is fixed. The psychic can see it because it already exists, just the way the rest of us can describe events of the past.
Folks who believe in fate, believe in a fixed future. If you believe that the chance meeting that allowed you to meet your spouse was arranged by “fate” that means that some mystical force is pushing us around to make the future come out a certain way.
Astrologers tell us our future is fixed by the position of the planets at our birth.
But the forces pushing us around, fixing our future, don’t have to be mystical. We’re all prisoners of our genetic inheritance, prisoners of the circumstances of our birth, prisoners of our desires and psychological states. Physicists tell us at the atomic level, our brains are made of the same stuff as the rest of the universe, so the chemical processes that we experience as “thoughts” are bound by the same natural laws that control the movement of every other atom.
So it’s not just Calvinist theologians but many scientists and philosophers, too, who agree that our future is just a hard slog down a narrow path, hemmed in on both sides with insurmountable walls that preventing from choosing a different future.
If that’s true, then what our church is today was determined completely on October 3, 1943. Inevitable. Long before that founding date, actually, the universe conspired that our church would be founded when it was, and would change its name several times, and build this building. And you would be here today, and the folks who aren’t here today would not be here. And I would be saying exactly these words, exactly now.
Despite all our hard-work and fretting the church would have come out just the same as it has, as it had to. And our pride at our accomplishments is misplaced, because we didn’t do it by our will, but simply because the universe was arranged this way.
The clients of California Psychics, love the idea of a fixed future, because the crave the feeling of certainty. The Calvinist theologians love the idea of a fixed future, because it allows them to believe in a perfect, unchanging, God.
But to me, belief in a fixed future is a horror. I crave not certainty, but freedom. The freedom to dream whatever I dream, and to work with the possibility that my effort might make a real difference. I find more comfort in regarding the future as an open space full of possibilities that I can make actual, than in a future that could be seen with certainty, but can’t be changed. I have no need of an eternal, unchanging God. I want a God who walks beside me, lives with me, hopes with me, partners with me in creation.
The winner of this year’s World Series depends on the players, not fate. The winner of the Presidential election depends on the will of the voters, not the will of God. The future is waiting to be created by the moment by moment decisions of each of us, and every other conscious thing.
Our choices are not entirely free. The givenness of the past does constrain us. We arrive at church with a building that was already built. The resources of this particular congregation allow us to do some things, but not all things. Our church’s character is shaped by our past, and our future will be shaped by who we are today. But I say “shaped” not fixed. We are the creators, and with the clay we have been given, we can create many different future shapes.
When I think of the past then, Herb Schneider and Ralph Waldo Emerson, I imagine them handing us a mass of clay that they shaped to a certain form, and saying, not, “here is what has always been and will always be, fired and hard and permanent,” but “here, from the clay I was given, I made this, and now I pass it to you, still soft and wet to make of it what you need.
I feel gratitude for the gifts of the past, but not obligation. As Emerson felt free to dream a new religion. As Herb Schneider felt free to reinvent himself from Unity minister to Unitarian minister. As this church has felt free to reinvent itself, again and again. We are still free, today.
What we owe our ancestors is not to fulfill their dreams, but to dream our own dreams, and let the ancestors dream through us. Our responsibility is to include the ancestors in our community, a community through time, and to carry them forward with us, not for them to hold us back.
I smile when I hear people reference the wisdom of the ancestors, while at the same time wanting nothing to do with their grandfather’s backward attitudes about race and sexuality. Why do we imagine that the ancestors were any more wise, or strong, or good, than we are? More likely they were just as flawed as we are, a mix of wise and ignorant, strong and weak, good and bad. They have lessons to teach us, but also limitations we would do well to outgrow, and we have new things to learn that they never knew.
And so, this is the kind of ancestor I wish to be to the generations that come after. I hope they will remember me, at least for a time, and remember me well. I hope they will honor me, and respect me. I hope, while I live that they will make use of my experience and what wisdom I have. I’d like, as my generation becomes the older generation, that the younger folks will allow me to mentor them, and to heed my warnings when they start down paths I know to be dangerous, because I faced those dangers myself.
But my goal is not to make choices for them, but to keep opening up possibilities for them to have more good choices available and to have the skill to be good choice-makers.
What I dream for this church is, I imagine, very like the dreams that Herb Schneider and the other founders of this church had eighty-one years ago, not a specific church, with a specific name, and a particular location, and a building that looks exactly like this one, but a dream of a community strong but flexible, open to the needs of their day, while carrying forward the legacy of what we made of the church when it was our day.
I hope that they will know and honor a sacred stream that flows through every ever-changing incarnation of our church. A steram of love and courage, hope and freedom, creativity and strength, compassion and service.
That is the church eternal I wish to belong to. That is the church that called to me out of the past when I first joined. Bless them. That is the church I wish for the future. Bless them, too.